OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a map database maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveys, trace from aerial photo imagery or satellite imagery, and import from other freely licensed geodata sources. OpenStreetMap is freely licensed under the Open Database License and is commonly used to make electronic maps, inform turn-by-turn navigation, and assist in humanitarian aid and data visualisation. OpenStreetMap uses its own data model to store geographical features which can then be exported into other GIS file formats. The OpenStreetMap website itself is an online map, geodata search engine, and editor. OpenStreetMap was created by Steve Coast in response to the Ordnance Survey, the United Kingdom's national mapping agency, failing to release its data to the public under free licences in 2004. Initially, maps in OSM were created only via GPS traces, but it was quickly populated by importing public domain geographical data such as the U.S. TIGER and by tracing imagery as permitted by source. OpenStreetMap's adoption was accelerated by the development of supporting software and applications and Google Maps' 2012 introduction of pricing. The database is hosted by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, a non-profit organisation registered in England and Wales, and is funded mostly via donations.

Editing software

The map data can be edited from a number of editing applications that provide aids including satellite and aerial imagery, street-level imagery, GPS traces, and photo and voice annotations. By default, the official OSM website directs contributors to the Web-based iD editor. Meta developed a fork of this editor, Rapid, that provides access to external datasets, including some derived from machine learning detections. For complex or large-scale changes, experienced users often turn to more powerful desktop editing applications such as JOSM and Potlatch. Several mobile applications also edit OSM. Go Map!! and Vespucci are the primary full-featured editors for iOS and Android, respectively. StreetComplete is an Android application designed for laypeople around a guided question-and-answer format. CoMaps, Every Door, Maps.me, Organic Maps, and OsmAnd include basic functionality for editing points of interest. Between 2018 and 2023, the top five editing tools by number of edits were JOSM, iD, StreetComplete, Rapid, and Potlatch.

Quality assurance

OSM accepts contributions from the general public. Changesets submitted through editors and the OSM API immediately enter the database and are quickly published for reuse, without going through peer review beforehand. The API only validates changes for basic well-formedness, but not for topological or logical consistency or for adherence to community norms. As a crowdsourced project, OSM is susceptible to several forms of data vandalism, including copyright infringement, graffiti, and spam. Overall, vandalism accounts for an estimated 0.2% of edits to OSM, which is relatively low compared to vandalism on Wikipedia. Members of the community detect and fix most unintentional errors and vandalism promptly, by monitoring the slippy map and revision history on the main website, as well as by searching for issues using tools like OSMCha, OSM Inspector, and Osmose. In addition to community vigilance, the OpenStreetMap Foundation's Data Working Group and a group of administrators are responsible for responding to vandals. , a comprehensive security assessment of the OSM data model has yet to take place. There have been several high-profile incidents of vandalism and other errors in OSM: In 2012, contractors affiliated with Google were found to be sabotaging OSM's navigation data in major cities around the world. Google responded by dismissing the contractors. In 2018, a vandal renamed New York City and some nearby map features to antisemitic names. Although the vandalism was quickly expunged, third-party replication lag caused it to resurface to readers of Wikipedia, as well as to users of Mapbox-powered applications such as Zillow, Snapchat, and Citibike. In 2020, Microsoft Flight Simulator players discovered an impossibly thin, 212-story building in a Melbourne suburb, which was traced to a typographical error that had gone unnoticed in OSM for a year. In 2021, Balad, an Iranian developer of OSM-based mobile navigation applications, apologized after the OSM community caught an employee vandalising streets in Iran. In 2023, the Taj Mahal was misidentified as "Shiva Kshetra (Shiv Mandir)" (a Hindu temple dedicated to Shiva) for 13 days until contributors from Kerala discovered and fixed it. Players of Pokémon Go have been known to vandalize OSM, one of the game's map data sources, to manipulate gameplay. However, this vandalism is casual, rarely sustained, and it is predictable based on the mechanics of the game.

Community

by a group of mappers. They took notes and photos, and recorded GPS tracks. Shown in the photo is the Betis group standing beside one of the Death March trail monuments.]] The project has a geographically diverse user-base, due to emphasis of local knowledge and "on-the-ground" situation in the process of data collection. Many early contributors were cyclists who survey with and for other cyclists, charting cycleroutes and navigable trails. Others are GIS professionals. Contributors are predominately men, with only 3–5% being women. By August 2008, shortly after the second The State of the Map conference was held, there were over 50,000 registered contributors; by March 2009, there were 100,000 and by the end of 2009 the figure was nearly 200,000. In April 2012, OpenStreetMap cleared 600,000 registered contributors. On 6 January 2013, OpenStreetMap reached one million registered users. Around 30% of users have contributed at least one point to the OpenStreetMap database. As per a study conducted in 2011, only 38% of members carried out at least one edit and only 5% of members created more than 1000 nodes. Most members are in Europe (72%). According to another study, when a competing maps platform is launched, OSM attracts fewer new contributors and pre-existing contributors increase their level of contribution possibly driven by their ideological attachment to the platform. Overall, there is a negative effect on the quantum of contributions.

Non-governmental organisations

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) is a nonprofit organisation promoting community mapping across the world. It developed the open source HOT Tasking Manager for collaboration, and contributed to mapping efforts after the April 2015 Nepal earthquake, the 2016 Kumamoto earthquakes, and the 2016 Ecuador earthquake. The Missing Maps Project, founded by the American Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and other NGOs, uses HOT Tasking Manager. The University of Heidelberg hosts the Disastermappers Project for training university students in mapping for humanitarian purposes. When Ebola broke out in 2014, the volunteers mapped 100,000 buildings and hundreds of miles of roads in Guinea in just five days. Local groups such as Ramani Huria in Dar es Salaam incorporate OSM mapping into their community resilience programmes. Community emergency response teams in San Francisco and elsewhere organise field surveys and mapathons to contribute information about fire alarm call boxes, hazard symbols, and other relevant features.

Conferences

or online. ]] Since 2007, the OpenStreetMap community has organised State of the Map (SotM), an annual international conference at which stakeholders present on technical progress and discuss policy issues. The conference is held each year in a different city around the world. Various regional editions of State of the Map are also held for each continent, regions such as the Baltics and Latin America, and some countries with especially active local communities, such as France, Germany, and the United States.

Operation

The official OSM website at openstreetmap.org is the project's main hub for contributors. A reference implementation of a slippy map (featuring a selection of third-party tile layers), a revision log, and integrations with basic geocoders and route planners facilitate the community's management of the database contents. Logged-in users can access an embedded copy of the iD editor and shortcuts for desktop editors for contributing to the database, as well as some rudimentary social networking features such as user profiles and diaries. The website's built-in REST API and OAuth authentication enable third-party applications to programmatically interact with the site's major functionality, including submitting changes. Much of the website runs as a Ruby on Rails application backed by a PostgreSQL database.

Software development

Strictly speaking, the OSM project produces only a geographic database, leaving data consumers to handle every aspect of postprocessing the data and presenting it to end users. However, a large ecosystem of command line tools, software libraries, and cloud services has developed around OSM, much of it as free and open-source software. Two kinds of software stacks have emerged for rendering OSM data as an interactive slippy map. In one, a server-side rendering engine such as Mapnik prerenders the data as a series of raster image tiles, then serves them using a library such as mod_tile. A library such as OpenLayers or Leaflet displays these tiles on the client side on the slippy map. Alternatively, a server application converts raw OSM data into vector tiles according to a schema, such as Mapbox Streets, OpenMapTiles, or Shortbread. These tiles are rendered on the client side by a library such as the Mapbox Maps SDK, MapLibre, Mapzen's Tangrams, or OpenLayers. Applications such as Mapbox Studio allow designers to author vector styles in an interactive, visual environment. Vector maps are especially common among three-dimensional mapping applications and mobile applications. Plugins are available for embedding slippy maps in content management systems such as WordPress. A geocoder indexes map data so that users can search it by name and address (geocoding) or look up an address based on a given coordinate pair (reverse geocoding). Several geocoders are designed to index OSM data, including Nominatim (from the Latin, 'by name'), which is built into the official OSM website along with GeoNames. Komoot's Photon search engine provides incremental search functionality based on a Nominatim database. The nonprofit Social Web Foundation's places.pub formats OSM locations as ActivityPub objects, enabling social media applications to enrich geocodes associated with check-ins. Element 84's natural language geocoder uses a large language model to identify OSM geometries to return. A variety of route planning libraries and services are based on OSM data. OSM's official website has featured GraphHopper, the Open Source Routing Machine, and Valhalla since February 2015. Other widely deployed routing engines include Openrouteservice and OpenTripPlanner, which specializes in public transport routing.

Uses

OSM is an important source of geographic data in many fields, including transportation, analysis, public services, and humanitarian aid. However, much of its use by consumers is indirect via third-party products, because customer reviews and aerial and satellite imagery are not part of the project per se.

Cartography

, central London, shown in the "Carto" OpenStreetMap layer]] A variety of applications and services allow users to visualise OSM data in the form of a map. The official OSM website features an interactive slippy map interface so that users can efficiently edit maps and view changesets. It presents the general-purpose OpenStreetMap Carto style alongside a selection of specialised styles for cycling and public transport. Beyond this reference implementation, community-maintained map applications focus on alternative cartographic representations and specialised use cases. For example, OpenRailwayMap is a detailed online map of the world's railway infrastructure based on OSM data. OpenSeaMap is a world nautical chart built as a mashup of OpenStreetMap, crowdsourced water depth tracks, and third-party weather and bathymetric data. OpenTopoMap uses OSM and SRTM data to create topographic maps. Tactile Map Automated Production prints tactile maps that feature embossed streets, paths, and railroads from OSM. On the desktop, applications such as GNOME Maps and Marble provide their own interactive styles. GIS suites such as QGIS allow users to produce their own custom maps based on the same data.

Geolocation

Many commercial and noncommercial websites feature maps powered by OSM data in locator maps, store locators, infographics, story maps, and other mashups. Locator maps on Wikipedia and Wikivoyage articles for cities and points of interest are powered by a MediaWiki extension and the OSM-based Wikimedia Maps service. The locator maps on Craigslist, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare City Guide, Gurtam's Wialon, and Snapchat are also powered by OSM. From 2013 to 2022, GitHub visualized any uploaded GeoJSON data atop an OSM-based Mapbox basemap. In 2012, Apple quietly switched the locator map in iPhoto from Google Maps to OSM. Interactive OSM-based maps appear in many augmented reality games, mobile navigation applications, and fitness applications, such as Strava.

Geospatial analysis

for analysis and map-making]] The Overpass API searches the OSM database for features whose metadata or topology match criteria specified in a structured query language. Overpass turbo is an integrated development environment for querying this API. Bellingcat develops an alternative Overpass frontend for geolocating photographs. QLever and Sophox are triplestores that accept standard SPARQL queries to return facts about the OSM database. Geographic information retrieval systems such as NLMaps Web and OSCAR answer natural language queries based on OSM data. OSMnx is a Python package for analysing and visualising the OSM road network. OSM is often a source for realistic, large-scale transport network analyses because the raw road network data is freely available or because of aspects of coverage that are uncommon in proprietary alternatives. OSM data can be imported into professional-grade traffic simulation frameworks such as Aimsun Next, Eclipse SUMO, and MATSim, as well as urban planning–focused simulators such as A/B Street. A team at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute has used Valhalla's map matching function to evaluate advanced driver-assistance systems. The United States Census Bureau has analysed routes generated by the Open Source Routing Machine along with American Community Survey data to develop a socioeconomic profile of commuters affected by the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse. OSM is also used in conservation and land-use planning research. The annual Forest Landscape Integrity Index is based on a comprehensive map of remaining roadless areas derived from OSM's road network. Computer vision researchers have trained convolutional neural networks on OSM's land use areas to perform feature detection and image segmentation on Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, both globally (OpenSentinelMap) and in Europe (OSMlanduse). Some newsrooms routinely incorporate OSM data into their workflows and data journalism projects. The Chicago Tribune maintains a dashboard of crime in Chicago visualized against an OSM basemap. The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times accompany articles with locator maps and more in-depth visuals that rely on OSM's hyperlocal coverage of places that have less detail in proprietary maps. Various groups, including researchers, data journalists, the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Geochicas, have used OSM in conjunction with Wikidata to explore the demographics of people honoured by street names and raise awareness of gender bias in naming decisions.

Navigation

bus in Denmark tracks the operator's route using OSM data.]] OSM is a data source for some Web-based map services. In 2010, Bing Maps introduced an option to display an OSM-based map and later began including building data from OSM by default. Wheelmap.org is a portal for discovering wheelchair-accessible places, mashing up OSM data with a separate, crowdsourced customer review database. Mobile applications such as CoMaps, CycleStreets, Karta GPS, Komoot, Locus Map, Maps.me, Organic Maps, and OsmAnd also provide offline route planning capabilities. Apple Maps uses OSM data in many countries. Some of Garmin's GPS products incorporate OSM data. OSM is a popular source for road data among Iranian navigation applications, such as Balad. Geotab and TeleNav also use OSM data in their in-car navigation systems. Some public transportation providers rely on OpenStreetMap data in their route planning services and for other analysis needs. OSM data appears in the driver or rider application or powers backend operations for ridesharing companies and related services. In 2022, Grab completed a migration from Google Maps and Here Maps to an in-house, OSM-based navigation solution, reducing trip times by about 90 seconds. In 2024, Ola introduced a mapping platform partly based on OSM data. In 2019, owners of Tesla cars found that the Smart Summon automatic valet parking feature within Tesla Autopilot relied on OSM's coverage of parking lot details. Webots uses OSM data to simulate realistic surroundings for autonomous vehicles.

Humanitarian aid

Humanitarian aid agencies use OSM data both proactively and reactively. OSM's road and building coverage allow them to discover patterns of disease outbreaks and target interventions such as antimalarial medications toward remote villages. After a disaster occurs, they produce large-format printed maps and downloadable maps for GPS tracking units for aid workers to use in the field. The 2010 Haiti earthquake established a model for non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to collaborate with international organisations. OpenStreetMap and Crisis Commons volunteers used available satellite imagery to map the roads, buildings and refugee camps of Port-au-Prince in just two days, building "the most complete digital map of Haiti's roads". The resulting data and maps have been used by several organisations providing relief aid, such as the World Bank, the European Commission Joint Research Centre, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, UNOSAT and others. After Haiti, the OpenStreetMap community continued mapping to support humanitarian organisations for various crises and disasters. After the Northern Mali conflict (January 2013), Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines (November 2013), and the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa (March 2014), the OpenStreetMap community in association with the NGO Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has shown it can play a significant role in supporting humanitarian organisations.

Gaming

OSM is a map data source for many location-based games that require broad coverage of local details such as streets and buildings. One of the earliest such games was Hasbro's short-lived Monopoly City Streets (2009), which offered a choice between OSM and Google Maps as the playing board. Battlefield 4 (2013) used a customized OSM-based Mapbox map in its leaderboards. In 2013, Ballardia shut down testing of World of the Living Dead: Resurrection, because too many players attempted to use the Google Maps–based game, then relaunched it after switching to OSM, which could handle thousands of players. in FlightGear Flight Simulator]] Flight simulators combine OSM's coverage of roads and structures with other sources of natural environment data, acting as sophisticated 3D map renderers, in order to add realism to the ground below. X-Plane 10 (2011) replaced TIGER and VMAP0 with OSM for roads, railways, and some bodies of water. Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) introduced software-generated building models based in part on OSM data. In 2020, FlightGear Flight Simulator officially integrated OSM buildings and roads into the official scenery. City-building games and business simulation games use a subset of OSM data as a base layer to take advantage of the player's familiarity with their surroundings. In NIMBY Rails (2021), the player develops a railway network that coexists with real-world roads and bodies of water. In Jutsu Games' Infection Free Zone (2024), the player builds fortifications amid a post-apocalyptic world based on OSM streets and buildings. Other titles include City Bus Manager, Global Farmer, and Logistical: Earth. These games incorporate realistic elements but take some liberties to enhance gameplay and mitigate gaps in OSM's coverage. Augmented reality games rely on OSM data to determine where rewards and other elements of the game spawn in the player's presence, such as the 'portals' in Ingress, the 'PokéStops' and 'Pokémon Gyms' in Pokémon Go, and the 'tappables' in Minecraft Earth (2019). In 2017, when Niantic migrated its augmented reality titles, including Ingress and Pokémon Go, from Google Maps to OSM, the overworld maps in these games initially became more detailed for some players but completely blank for others, due to OSM's uneven geographic coverage at the time. In the first six weeks after launching in South Korea, Pokémon Go produced a seventeenfold spike in daily OSM contributions within the country. In 2024, Niantic migrated its titles to Overture Maps data, which incorporates some OSM data.

References

Bibliography

External links

Official wiki

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1376619296 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.

Names in other languages